Specialty Coffee News and Events from Around the World

April 2010

April 27, 2010

Before I headed off to Ethiopia in March, I went to Mill Valley, California, where I often go. That's where the laboratory of Boot Coffee Consulting is. I do lots of work with Boot Coffee. It's a pretty unique operation. Basically, this is super high-end coffee education.

For the last few years I have helped teach the classes in the laboratory there, specifically cupping and roasting courses. I'm now often the lead instructor for the Intro level courses. If you have ever read this blog and thought about taking some coffee courses, you should think about coming to one of our Roast Profiling & Cupping courses. I'm teaching one in May and another in June, but Boot Coffee offers them year round.

Students always remark on what a great class it is. There's a great blend of technical information, theoretical instruction, and hands-on work. I've had people who worked in the industry 10 years come to one of these and leave by remarking how much they learned in just three days. But we also get beginners all the time. After one course they are already way ahead of the game.

We always make great friends, and the setting in Marin County, California, is beautiful and peaceful.

For instance, this picture is from a class I taught this past winter. The middle two gentlemen, Rick and Daniel, were passionate coffee lovers but had not really worked in the industry much. Flash forward a couple of months... I just ran into each of them at the trade show in Los Angeles, where they were cupping fresh crop micro-lots by the dozen; coffees that many professionals never get the chance to experience. These guys are hard core!

So I was down in California doing this stuff before I went to Ethiopia, and I will be back there again soon. In our next installment: off to Africa.

I seem to have been under especially strident assault from the spam monsters in the last week or so. For the time being, I will be holding comments for moderation. If you leave a comment, it will not appear automatically, but I will try and get everyone's comments up as fast as possible!

April 25, 2010

A couple weeks back in Brooklyn, I sat down with journalist Benjamin Wallace to eat some coffee beans. He wrote an article for Business Week about "alternative" ways to get your coffee fix, including a cool new coffee-inhaler type device that I got to try. You can read the article here.

Benjamin Wallace was also the writer who, when working on a story for GQ, tasted kopi luwak with me. Here's Ben giving an interesting talk at the TED conference, based on the article he wrote and the research he did for it.

April 23, 2010

Hi everyone. I am back from my seven week trip which took me to San Francisco, Ethiopia, New York City, and Los Angeles. From the safety and comfort of Seattle in the springtime, I'll be writing a running diary of what happened on my trip, complete with pointers and diagrams and photos and videos.

On my trip I did lots of cupping, roasting, brewing, shot-pulling, and other assorted coffee activities; plus goat-roasting, cold-catching, storm-dodging, train-taking, whiskey-drinking, and people-meeting. So stay tuned for stories and pointers from the World of Coffee.

In the meantime, I would like to offer a hearty congratulations to Søren Stiller Markussen for winning the Danish Barista Championship this week. Søren was part of the Harar Cupping Caravan in March. He's a really great guy, and I have a couple of stories about him to tell in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, here's a picture. Søren's in the front-middle, in the plaid shirt. Hard to tell here, but he's crouching slightly. He's actually a quite tall man (taller than yours truly, behind him in the pink shirt).